Project Zomboid is an isometric zombie survival RPG created by a four person team from Britain. It takes inspiration from games like Survival Crisis Z and X-COM. The game is set in a fictionalised version of Muldraugh, Kentucky; a small town by the side of a highway which includes a number of businesses, a large logging camp, some light industry, and various classes of housing. The developers are releasing periodic updates, Minecraft style, with each update adding a feature or two to the game. Features to be added include randomly generated quests and NPCs, expansion of the perks and skills system, more weapons, more craftable items, and more survival needs like sanity and hygiene.

Notable for havingextremelybadluck, but still managing to get the pre-public demo out on schedule, give or take a few months. You can play the (now quite outdated) demo here. The game also managed to get enough votes in the Greenlight system on Steam, allowing it to be purchasable as an Early Access game. Updates and bug-fixes are still on-going, of course.

This game contains examples of:

The Alcoholic: The character can get drunk in order to reduce panic. If you get drunk enough, your character will randomly stumble around.

Action Survivor: All player characters start out unskilled and unequipped, with no more advantages than some basic professional training.

Awesome but Impractical: Combat, full stop. While a competent player will have no trouble with a half-dozen or so zombies, any more than that and the best option is usually to just run, no matter how well equipped you are. Melee combat is silent but extremely dangerous (a single bite or scratch could result in you eventually zombifying), the shotgun is devastating and safe to use but it attracts zombies from all over the map to your position, and Molotov cocktails attract zombies and run the risk of burning down your safehouse, as well as potentially killing you.

Booze-Based Buff: Alcohol can substitute for painkillers, anti-depressants, sleeping pills, and beta-blockers. However, drinking too much will make the player drunk, and mess up coordination.

Boring but Practical: The Park Ranger profession. While it doesn't help with combat or barricading, given how much it rains in Knox County, the weather resistance is actually pretty handy.

Continuing Is Painful: If your character dies, you can begin another on the same map - without any skills or inventory, at a random point on the map.

Crapsack World: And not just for your character. The game is unwinnable by design: "These are the end-times. There was no hope of survival. This is how you died." At least you can't say you weren't warned.

Disposable Woman: Kate Smith, the demo character's wife, can survive the tutorial (and, in fact, be perfectly fine aside from the leg injury), depending on the player's actions... but plays no further role in the story either way.

Do Not Run with a Gun: Some lighter weapons can be used while moving, but heavy ones will immobilise the player character.

Downer Beginning: You start off the tutorial with your things stolen, no food, a wife with a broken leg, and zombies everywhere.

Downer Ending: There’s no chance of rescue or a game win screen; you will die eventually.

Dying Moment of Awesome: The game is littered with these. Knowing that you're infected and running out onto the street to die in a blaze of glory are fun parts of the game.

Endless Game: Well, endless in that the game doesn't end until you die.

Everything Fades: Completely averted. In later versions bodies will remain on the map until they gradually decay (leaving skeletons behind which will never disappear unless taken) and rain will eventually be able to wash away any outdoor bloodstains, but in the current version, every single corpse, bit of gore, and blood spatter will remain on the map permanently, providing a rather satisfying visual record of the player's exploits.

From Bad to Worse: Paypal decides to limit their account. Then Google Checkout decides to mess with them. Then a there was a car bombing near their flat. Then two of the devs were robbed.

Gateless Ghetto: Justified in that the town is under quarantine. As the game goes on, the infection will spread, the quarantine lines will either expand outward or be overrun, and more areas of the map will thus become open for player exploration.

Ghost Town: Eventually. At the start of the outbreak the town is fairly heavily populated with NPCs, but the vast majority of them die in the first few days and the rest will hole up and hide, leaving the streets deathly quiet.

Heal Thyself: Although there is no instant health, you can still treat injuries by bandaging them and getting plenty of food and rest while waiting for them to heal naturally, using pills to treat any pain.

Hide Your Children: Although the developers are still actively debating amongst themselves and the community as to whether or not children will appear in the game, the 'no' side of the argument is currently winning.

Improvised Weapon: Baseball bats, a hammer, and boards of wood can be used as weapons. Get some nails, and you can have yourself a spiked bat. Get an empty bottle, a rag, a torn sheet, or a sock, along with some gasoline, and you have a molotov cocktail.

Schedule Slip: The general rule of thumb is that an update will never be released on the day it's scheduled to be released on, and might take anywhere from weeks to months more than originally intended.

Sanity Slippage: So far, the worst you can get with your sanity, is panicked. It startles your character, upon seeing zombies, but later versions promise

In earlier versions, the player will see ghostly versions of zombies everywhere, even more so as the insanity gets worse.

Save Scumming: The game autosaves every time you sleep or close the game, so this is extremely difficult to do, although still hypothetically possible (though prone to causing bugs) if you manually back up your savegame files, or forcibly close the game.

Serial Escalation: Surviving a single day in this game is relatively easy. Surviving a week is challenging but doable. Surviving a month is hard. The longest verified time that a player has survived in the current version? Over eleven months. Worth noting that the eventual cause of his demise was not the zombies, but rather the fact that there was no more food left on the map and farming and hunting haven't been implemented yet.

Currently, the shotgun is only a Wedge Of Death because there's no code for 'slight damage' on zombies with ranged weapon.

Sprint Meter: If you run around a lot, you will get a exhausted moodlet that will prevent you from running, and will make your melee attacks weaker. If you do so while heavily encumbered with loot you can actually injure your back.

Too Awesome to Use: In some ways, the shotgun. Its noise will attract zombies from all about, making it more useful when there already is a zombie horde, not to mention ammo is somewhat rare.

Wizard Needs Food Badly: As the game goes on, you will need to look for food to eat. Start going hungry, and your strength goes down, and your healing time decreases. Starve yourself, and you start losing health, along with a massive decrease in strength.

Zombie Apocalypse: Using pure Max Brooks rules - no fast infected, no special infected, no zombified animals, only headshots kill, and no immunity - a single bite will infect you, no exceptions, with the only currently confirmed cure for a zombie bite being immediate amputation of the affected limb.

Zombie Infectee: Getting bitten will cause this. Getting scratched has less of a chance. Once infected however, it is only a matter of time before you join the zombie ranks.

Varying on your choice to edit the world prior to launch, you can choose how bad infections are: They can be instant, take hours, days or weeks. Or if you really just want to increase your survival chances, disable infections altogether. Doesn't stop you from getting colds, though.

Getting a cold while being a hypochondriac will net you fake moodles about being infected.

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